Descartes, Spencer, and Freud Reflection

 Descartes's reasoning for the forces that inspire laughter made me laugh. I have never heard such creative reasoning to the biological processes associated with laughter and its accompaniment two the three of the six basic emotions wonder, hatred and Joy. He describes one of the reasons for laughter by saying, "which part of the blood being driven by the heart by some slight emotion of hatred, assisted by the surprise of wonder, and mingling itself there with the blood from the rest of the body" (Descartes 22). As a biology major, I have never heard of blood mingling with wonder and flowing through the rest of the body. I also completely disagree with the accusation that laughter can only be propelled by wonder, joy or hatred. I have laughed out of frustration, ignorance, and confusion, none of which I would associate with joy, wonder, or hatred. Creating these binaries for what humor can be is against what upholds the mystery of humor. Dissecting and analyzing incorrectly, I might at the science behind humor takes the fun out of it. I see humor as a natural reaction to share with those who are lucky enough to make you laugh.

I found Freud's cryptic analysis of humor through the minds of the experience and the humorist wildly overanalyzed and incredibly confusing. He claims that "the hearer must have copied the process in the mind of the humorist…in the listener, we may suppose there is only an echo, a copy of this unknown process" (Freud113). I find these accusations of being wildly untrue. How can the person experiencing humor subconsciously know what the one professing the humor is going to say to experience a laugh accurately? I find this philosophical take on humor untrue and an analysis that did not need to be made.

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